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TUntpetsitig ot Xonbon 

(Faculty of Arts) 



Numbers in History 

HOW THE GREEKS DEFEATED THE PERSIANS 

THE ROMANS CONQUERED THE WORLD 

THE TEUTONS OVERTHREW THE ROMAN EMPIRE 

AND 

WILLIAM THE NORMAN TOOK POSSESSION OF ENGLAND 

Two Lectures delivered before the University of London 
on October 6 and 7, igi^ 



BY 

DR. HANS DELBRUCK 

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN 




Xonbon: 'dntversiti^ of XonDon ipress 

PUBLISHED FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PRESS, LTD. 

BY HODDER & STOUGHTON 

1913 



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NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

Historians of our day are supposed to 
study one period or the other of the history 
of mankind, because nobody, not even the 
greatest scholar, would be able to master 
history on the whole. But it is not sufficient 
to divide the researches by periods of time, 
because periods are not to be understood by 
themselves only, but must be always illus- 
trated by the preceding and following times, 
and even by times very far apart, throwing 
their light by analogies. To profit by this 
kind of elucidation, we are forced to divide 
the work of historical research not only in 
breadth, but also in length. We must have 
historians not only of the Greeks, the 
Romans, or the Middle Ages, but also 
specialists for Constitutional History, or 
Economic History, or History of Literature, 
History of Art, or whatever branches may be 

5 



6 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

chosen. On this basis, for forty years, I 
have studied the History of the Art of War. 
I began this study when I came back, as a 
student, from the Franco-German War. 

The first object I turned to was the com- 
parison between the strategy of Napoleon 
and Frederick the Great, in which I hold 
views opposed to those entertained by the 
officers of the s^eneral staff of the Prussian 
army. Even to this day the controversy 
which arose here has not been settled. I 
had come to this question in the theoretical 
history of strategy, working on the life of 
General Gneisenau, the chief of Field- 
Marshal Bliicher's staff, the man who gave 
to the Field-Marshal the opportunity of 
making the joke, that he, the Field-Marshal, 
was the only man who could kiss his own 
head. From these studies in modern wars I 
turned to older times, and wrote a little book, 
Die Perserkrieoe und die Bur gunderkrie ge ^ 
in which I compared the war of the Persian 
kings against the Greeks with the war of 
Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, against 
the Swiss. I shall say at once in what sense 
this comparison is meant. At last I published 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY T 

up to date three volumes under the title 
(History of the Art of War), Geschichte 
der Krie gskunst im Rahjnen der fo litis chen 
Geschichte, beginning with the Battle of 
Marathon and reaching to the end of the 
Middle Ages. The fourth volume, which I 
have now in hand, is a very difficult piece of 
work, as the subject and its field are extend- 
ing more and more. Some of the results of 
this work I now intend to present to you. 

One of the first observations which I 
made, comparing the phenomena of history 
of war in different ages, was, as I already 
said, the similarity between the battles in 
which the Swiss conquered Duke Charles the 
Bold and the battles in which the Greeks 
overcame the Persians. The Swiss army was 
composed of men armed with pikes and 
halberds, supported by a few archers and a 
few horsemen. The army of the Duke was 
composed of horsemen and archers ; the 
newly-invented fire-arm was not of any signifi- 
cance. Likewise the Greek armies were made 
up of men with pikes, with but few archers 
and perhaps no horsemen, while the Persians 
were an army of horsemen and archers. 



8 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

Again and again ^schylus sings in his 
tragedy, The Persians, of the victory of 
the pike over the arrow. The Milesian 
Aristogarus comes to Sparta and tells the 
people that the Persians go to war, not clad 
in iron, as the Greeks used to be, but in " hats 
and trousers"; that is to say, they were distant 
and not hand-to-hand fighters, as the Greeks. 
So Vv^e have, in an interval of two thousand 
years, exactly the same arms and -the same 
political institutions fighting each other. On 
the one side a great war lord with his knights 
and bowmen, on the other citizens and 
peasants, republicans, w^ith arms for hand- 
to-hand fighting, and in both cases the latter 
had the victory over the former. If so, it 
seemed to me evident that from the course 
of the battles of Granson, Murten, and 
Nancy, where the Swiss smote the Bur- 
gundians, an historian might draw con- 
clusions regarding the course of the battles 
of Marathon and Plataese. Our historical 
knowledge of these battles is extensive 
enough, but of very little trustworthiness. 
Father Herodotus, almost our only source 
for the Persian War, wrote down his tale 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY d 

forty or fifty years after the events, and then 
only what the people told him; assuredly 
what people tell each other a generation 
after will very often be not history, but only 
legend. And we have not even the control 
of a second Greek historian, to say nothing 
of what would be much more important, a 
tale from the other side, from a Persian. 
Can we believe in such a tradition at all ? 
The historian Niebuhr once in a pessimistic 
vein remarked that there had been a war 
between Greeks and Persians, and that the 
Greeks had been victorious there could be 
no doubt; but this, too, was really all that 
we could with certainty say about these 
most celebrated incidents in the world's 
history. 

If we really had no other source than the 
tale of Herodotus, the tragedy of ^schylus, 
and here and there a sliQ;ht reference in 
another Greek author, I should indeed feel 
obliged to agree with Niebuhr, to confess that 
we know little or nothing about this first 
period of classic history. But there do exist 
resources, to which we may turn for aid. 
First there are modern geography and maps; 



10 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

these give us the most exact pictures of the 
countries in which the struggles took place; 
and then there are the laws of tactics, which 
can be determined for every sort of arms. 
Now the tale of Herodotus, even if we are 
sceptical to the highest degree, shows us 
with certainty the battle-fields. It is quite 
clear from the detail which he gives that 
he himself visited these places. And with 
regard to the tactics, we know already the 
kind of arms used in these battles; and the 
battles of the Swiss-Burgundian War show 
us, in the full light of history, the relative 
virtues of the different weapons one to 
another. More than that, there does exist 
a tale of the Swiss battles by Bullinger, that, 
like the tale of Herodotus, is taken from the 
mouth of the people a generation after. But 
while we have nothing about the Greek War 
but this tale, we have contemporary tales 
and letters concerning the Burgundian War, 
which not only give us control of Bullinger's 
tale, but show also how the real facts in the 
mouth of the people are gradually changed. 
Learning to distinguish in Bullinger between 
legend and history, our eye is sharpened to 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 11 

make the same distinctions in the tale of 
Herodotus. 

For this reason it was that in an appendix 
to my above-mentioned book, I gave the 
tale of Bullinger in print. The Swiss them- 
selves had not yet done it, because this tale 
seemed worthless compared with the older 
and better ones. 

Now the first point to which in any history 
of war we have to direct our attention is the 
number of the warriors. It is impossible to 
form a judgment about any act of fighting 
if you do not picture to yourself the size of 
the armies. A movement that a thousand 
men would make forthwith is for twenty 
thousand already a strategic movement; for 
100,000 a masterpiece, for 300,000 an impos- 
sibility. Just so with the provisioning of an 
army, and provisioning is the half of con- 
ducting a campaign. But as important as 
the numbers are in war and in the decision 
of war, just as difficult is the determination 
of these numbers for the historian. 

The best strategy is, as the great philo- 
sopher of war, Carl v. Clausewitz, has said, 
always to be very strong, first on the whole. 



12 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

and then at the decisive point. That appears 
to be very simple and a mere matter of course ; 
it is, however, in no way the guiding idea 
for the manner in which the people conceive 
and hand down their military exploits. On 
the contrary, nothing gives more pleasure to 
the soul of the people, and nothing is related 
by the narrator more willingly, than that a 
small host has conquered a greater. Shake- 
speare makes King Henry V say -before the 
Battle of x\gincourt — 

If we are marked to die, we are enow 
To do our country loss ; and if to live 
The fewer men the greater share of honour. 

It is not o'oino- too far if a direct antithesis 
is here stated. The organizer of the army 
as well as the commander-in-chief direct 
their whole power and attention to attack 
the enemy with the greatest possible superior 
strength. By the people, however, the merit 
in this is never seen. They glorify the 
fact that it has been the minority which has 
conquered the majority. Thus the few 
Greeks have conquered the innumerable 
masses of the Persians ; the Swiss peasants, 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 13 

few in numbers, the hosts of the Habsburg 
and Burgundian Dukes; and how the eyes 
of the Prussian youth shine when he reads 
that Frederick the Great, with 30,000 men, 
the Potsdamer Guard, has fallen on the 
flank of the supposed 90,000 Austrians at 
Leuthen ! The French like to dwell on 
nothing better in the history of 1870 than 
the account of how they fought in the battle 
of Worth, hour after hour, against the ever- 
increasing superior strength of the Germans, 
and finally succumbed only when it had 
grown to thrice their number. The Germans, 
again, extol Vionville, where two of our army 
corps offered an unconquerable opposition to 
the doubly superior force of Bazaine. But 
might there not be within it an unconscious, 
indirect criticism of the chief command of 
the German army, which exposed two isolated 
army corps to a struggle with the main body 
of the French army, whilst eight other corps 
stood in the background, but so far away 
that they were unable to interfere? In the 
same way the inferiority of MacMahon at 
Worth throws the final blame upon the 
French Government and the French nation, 



14 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

who, although equal then in numbers to the 
Germans, had placed in comparison so few 
of their sons for the defence of the country. 
In these examples we have contemplated 
an antithesis, deeply rooted in the human 
mind, which pervades, governs, and renders 
difficult the transmission of the history of 
war. The greatest of all warlike virtues is 
bravery, and bravery in a struggle of the 
minority against a majority, or indeed in a 
conquest of the majority by the minority, 
appears most marked and unquestionable. 
For this reason the most unreliable and 
incredible of all the many inaccuracies 
handed down to us in the chronicles is the 
number of the armies. Without approxiniately 
accurate numbers an exact knowledge and 
a true understanding of martial proceedings 
are absolutely impossible. That is obvious. 
How, however, is one to obtain accurate 
numbers, when only incorrect ones have been 
handed down to us? The task seems to be 
almost a hopeless one, for it is not only the 
patriotic legends which create the incorrect 
numbers; but the generals themselves, who 
have given full particulars concerning their 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 15 

deeds, are only too much inclined to in- 
crease their fame by the help of inaccurate 
numerical returns. Napoleon claims in his 
first campaign, 1796, to have conquered 
80,000 Austrians and Sardinians with 30,000 
men ; but in truth he was only a little weaker 
than his opponent, some 40,000 against 
47,000 men. Even Frederick the Great, 
whose memorable deeds are distinguished 
in his Memoirs by truthfulness, cannot help 
altering the numbers in the battles of his 
wars, also in the list of losses, very often much 
in his favour; and even where that tendency 
is lacking, and the historians have attempted 
by calculations to determine the numbers, it 
is also often not easy in the most recent wars 
to arrive at sure conclusions. Only in the 
last twenty years have we ascertained how 
strong Napoleon was at Jena and how strong 
the allies were in the battle of Leipzig. In 
these new investigations we can not only 
draw upon the very numerous individual 
statements of contemporaries and fellow- 
combatants, which check each other mutu- 
ally, but we can also especially make use of 
the archival documents, reports of army 



16 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

strength and official lists of casualties. In 
spite of that the work was difficult. How 
may it, then, be possible to maintain some- 
thinor in some deo-ree reliable concernino- the 
Middle Ages, or Antiquity, where often only 
a single statement is at our command, whose 
origin is unreliable, and where nothing from 
the enemy's camp can confront it as a check?, 
Ought we to believe what Caesar informs us 
of concerning the gigantic armies of the 
Gauls, whose conquest is his glory, since w^e 
have now seen that neither Napoleon nor 
Frederick in this respect is to be trusted? 
Before Hannibal left Italy he had had en- 
graved on the wall of a Greek temple how 
strong the army was with which he had so often 
conquered the Romans and terrified Italy. 
The Greek Polybius read this inscription 
himself and quoted its contents in his work. 
What better source can there be ? But is 
the statement of Hannibal really reliable? 
Sometimes we have, though indeed seldom 
enough, numbers which are subjectively 
beyond every doubt, like the statements of 
Thucydides concerning the number of the 
armed citizens of Athens, or the official 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 17 

numbers of the Roman Census, which Livy 
and other writers have preserved for us. 
Unfortunately, however, the interpretation 
of what the numbers really meant and to 
what they referred is not absolutely to be 
determined, and scholars have consequently 
drawn from them conclusions which show 
a difference of twice as much again, and 
more. 

Shall scientific study, however, really end 
in such complete scepticism? The num- 
bers, not only of armies but also of popula- 
tion, are of the greatest importance for all 
historical life and development — if we must 
confess concerning the numbers that we do 
not know them, what can we then say in 
general concerning the historical phenomena ?, 

The same means by which we have shat- 
tered the belief in the reliability of the num- 
bers handed down in the sources will assist 
us in procuring better numbers. It is the 
comparison of the numbers one with another. 
All numbers control each other mutually ; not 
only the numbers from the same time and of 
the same event, but also those from the most 
remote periods of time. 



18 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

It is a recognized fact that Moltke dis- 
played great cleverness and genius in 1870, 
when he directed the monstrous mass of his 
troops from one centre, drew them up abreast, 
and made them act together in battle. His 
work was lightened for him by the fact that 
the drawing up of the troops was executed in 
a very broad front and not less than nine 
railway lines could be used for this deploy. 
Numerous macadamized roads further light- 
ened the marches of the troops, and particu- 
larly of the wagons. The telegraph trans- 
mitted all commands with the swiftness of 
lightning; an apparatus for orders, developed 
most delicately during many decades, the 
organization of assistants, the general staff, 
bore and shared the work of the commander. 
The strength of the army was about 400,000 
men in the first line, followed by 100,000 in a 
second line. To direct such a mass unitedly 
is, even with railways, roads, telegraphs, and a 
general staff, an exceedingly difficult task, and 
that it is so is also shown by the previously 
mentioned example that on the day of Vion- 
ville, of ten army corps ready at hand, not 
much more than two were really engao^ed in 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 19 

action ; some of the others were too far in the 
rear, the rest had been led in a direction 
v/here there was no enemy. So there was 
doubtless a mistake, but one of those mis- 
takes which are unavoidable in w^ar, which 
therefore are only stated by the critic, but 
do not deserve to be blamed. They serve us 
now as a proof that, even under the command 
of a man recognized by friend and foe as 
peerless, mistakes in the conduct of such 
numbers may always happen, especially be- 
cause the commander-in-chief, in the impos- 
sibility of leading such masses directly, has 
to leave very much to the independent deci- 
sion of the subordinate generals. 

Well, now, if it was so difficult to move 
400,000 men with such aid, by such a man, 
then all those reports which we have received 
of similar armies in olden times of the 
Assyrians, Persians, Gauls, Huns or Ger- 
mans, are struck out of history. How could 
Attila have led 700,000 men from Germany 
over the Rhine into France to the Plain of 
Chalons, if Moltke moved 500,000 with 
such difficulty over the same road ? The one 
number acts as a check on the other. The 



30 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

view of the army movements of 1870 gives 
us a common standard of measure for the 
movements of the armies in far remote times. 
The armies, however, demand not only to 
be moved, but also to be provided with food. 
Even for this side of campaigning the 
later war-history gives us measures of which 
we can make use for olden times. When 
Bazaine with his whole army was besieged 
in Metz, it was necessary to maintain the 
200,000 men of the besieging army for ten 
weeks on the same spot. Metz lies only about 
twenty-five English miles distant from the 
German boundary of that time. Behind lay 
a railway which connected directly with 
Germany; in spite of this, the provisioning 
of those 200,000 men with their army service 
corps proved to be an exceedingly difficult 
piece of work. The commissariat officer 
Engelhard, to whom it was entrusted, has 
left behind notes concerning it, from which 
one can most clearly understand with what 
internal difficulties such a seemingly simple 
business had to struggle ; nothing seems more 
prosaic than the buying and delivering of 
bread, rusks, bacon, meat, erbswurst, hay, or 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 21 

whatever it might be, but the struggle with 
the object is so entangled that one reads 
the tale straightway with sustained attention, 
and these merely business-like transactions 
become most amusing incidents. There is, 
indeed, a railway, but the number of the 
approaching cars is so great that they cover 
the tracks and block the railway. The pro- 
visions arrive, but men are lacking to unload 
them, until a large company of bearers has 
been sent for from a manufacturing town. 
The provisions are unloaded, but now 
covered space is lacking; they lie in the rain 
and are spoiled ; of the enormous quantity of 
bread, which back in Berlin was baked, 
almost nothing of it reached the troops, be- 
cause it was mouldy before they could get it. 
The troops had originally no vehicles with 
which to fetch their provisions from the last 
station, Remilly, and when they had the 
wagons, the roads were soon so ruined by 
traffic that in rainy weather they remained 
stuck in the mud. What finally came to their 
aid? It was discovered that on the railway 
through Nancy, which had been assigned to 
the third army, then before Paris, the same 



22 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

obstruction prevailed, and far ahead cars with 
provisions were standing on the tracks which 
should have been dispatched to them, but had 
made no progress. These cars the commis- 
sariat officer Engelhard seized, and thus fed 
the army before Metz. But when the rail- 
way to Paris was again open, the third army 
demanded their pilfered provisions, which 
request naturally, as Engelhard dryly re- 
marks, " could only be answered -by giving 
receipts for what he had taken." ^ 

In mathematics, the shortest way to come 
from one point to another is the straight line ; 
not so in history, if you want to come from 
the assertion of a contemporary to the real 
truth. We had to work our way through by 
roundabout paths, to discuss the question of 
the relative force of the Greeks and Per- 
sians. Herodotus tells us quite exactly that 
5,100,000 men was the strength of the army 
of Xerxes, including all the servants that 
followed the warriors. Seldom in these 
2500 years has this number been doubted, 
and even up to date it has found defenders, 

^ Cf. Geist und Masse in der Geschichte. Freuss, 
Jahrb. 147, p. 193 (19^2). 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 23 

although, if it were true, one may calculate 
that, marching through paths, often very nar- 
row, between the mountains, the last men 
could only have left Susa, beyond the Tigris, 
when the first arrived before Thermopylae. 
But, after rejecting the enormous ciphers of 
tradition, the question is not yet settled. We 
must go still further and ask, if the Persians 
had not an enormous majority, had they one 
at all ? Most historians up to date think that 
there can be no doubt. They will not believe 
that the Greeks should have told of such an 
enormous superiority of the Persians, if at 
least they had not been more numerous than 
they themselves. And why not? The 
Greeks had a very small country, not even 
fertile. Xerxes commanded a world empire. 
Why should he not have led an army at least 
two or three times as large as the Greeks 
could bring together? Quite right, but now 
there comes the Burgundian analogy. The 
Swiss, too, tell us of the manifold superiority 
with which Duke Charles fought their own 
armies; and the Duke had countries with a 
much larger population than the Swiss can- 
tons. Notwithstanding, the documents leave 



24 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

no doubt that the hundred thousands of 
Charles the Bold are a fable, and that not 
the Burg-undians, but the Swiss had a con- 
siderable superiority in their battles. Why 
shall the Greeks have more credibility than 
the Swiss? Are we to believe them only 
because we have no Persian author who con- 
tradicts their stories ? 

These arguments, at least, seem to me 
strong enough to permit scepticism about 
tradition, but we can say more. We may not 
trust the tales of Herodotus, but, as we have 
already seen, we are entitled to trust him 
about the places where the battles were 
fought and about the marches that the Per- 
sian army made between Thermopylae and 
Athens. Now, the Plain of Marathon is so 
small that some fifty years ago a Prussian 
staff officer, who visited it, wrote with some 
astonishment that a Prussian brigade would 
scarcely have room enough there for its 
exercises. 

So also in the campaign of Xerxes and 
Mardonius we find marches that evidently 
an army of more than twenty, or at most 
twenty-five thousand men, could not have 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 25 

made. Xerxes had taken Athens and rested 
there perhaps a fortnight, until the Battle of 
Salamis, but his troops did not even advance 
to Megara, a town only twenty English miles 
from Athens, and one that would have been 
of the greatest importance for the Persians 
to take. There can be no other ground for 
this omission than that the Persian army was 
too weak to hold both points, Athens and 
Megara, together. 

I will not go any more into detail, but draw 
at once my conclusion that, in fact, the 
Greeks were stronger in numbers than the 
Persians, and meet the objections : how then 
was this Persian invasion so great a danger 
for Greek freedom, and why did the King of 
Kings not bring a greater army with him from 
his empire? 

The answer is the same as with the Swiss. 
The glory of the Swiss is not that they smote 
ihe enemy at great odds, but that their enemy 
had an army of knights and professional 
warriors, while the Swiss were a levy of 
citizens and peasants. The great mass of 
the subjects of Charles the Bold did not go 
to war, but were peace-loving inhabitants of 



26 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

town and country. Just so the great mass 
of the subjects of King Xerxes were men who 
had nothing to do with war, but were over- 
come two generations before by the Persian 
warriors. 

The foundation of the Persian Empire may 
be compared with the extension of the 
Mohammedan Caliphate 1200 years later; 
except that the King of the Persians is not 
a prophet nor the lieutenant of the prophet, 
but only the secular head of the people and 
chief of the warriors, although the Persians 
also, like the Arabs, professed a religion 
revealed to them by the prophet Zoroaster. 
The Persian warriors were as brave as any 
people not yet touched by civilization, and 
had not grown effeminate by riches and 
luxury. They were so celebrated for their 
bravery that Herodotus himself tells us that 
before the engagements of Marathon, etc., 
the Greeks did not dare to look the Persians 
in the face. Could the Greeks have smitten 
the Persians, if these at the same time had 
been more numerous and braver than them- 
selves? Here you see very clearly how the 
legend works. To tell us that the comm.on 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 27 

people won the victory over a gallant 
chivalry does not suit the popular imagina- 
tion. To satisfy that popular taste and 
talk there must be a victory of a minority 
over a majority. The people are not logical, 
a contradiction does not trouble them; so 
we find in the tale of Herodotus that the 
Persians were the most gallant warriors of 
the world, and at the same time that their 
cowardly masses could only be driven into 
the battle by flogging. 

The question of the numbers once settled, 
the battles of Marathon and Platae^ are 
easily understood. The Persians, as we have 
seen, were bowmen and horsemen, the Greeks 
one long line, a phalanx of ironclad foot- 
men with pikes. The great danger for the 
Greeks was that, while they were marching 
forward to attack the Persian bowmen, the 
cavalry might come into their flanks and 
disturb their order, so that they would not 
be able to continue their attack against the 
bowmen, and must fall by and by under their 
arrows. How could this difficulty be over- 
come? The battle-field of Marathon will tell 
us. In the Plain of Marathon there is a place 



28 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

just fit for an Athenian army, protected on 
both flanks by hills and rocks. Here 
Miltiades placed his men and awaited the 
attack of the Persians. If the Athenians had 
gone out into the plain the Persian riders 
would have seized them on the flanks. If 
they had remained stationary, they would 
have fallen under the Persian arrows. The 
decision of the battle depended upon the 
commanding officer. He kept his men on the 
spot and precipitated them at the moment 
when the Persian bowmen were near enough 
to attack them on the run. To use a modern 
expression, the task was to change from 
the defensive to the offensive at the right 
moment. The greatness of the Athenian 
people is that at this moment they had a 
man who was able to fulfil this task, that they 
had a belief in him, that they made him their 
leader, and that they obeyed his command. 
How difficult it was to bring the mass of a 
democratic people, where every man believed 
himself to be as clever as his general, to per- 
form such an artificial manoeuvre is strik- 
ingly shown by an incident in the Battle of 
Plataese, where Pausanius had proposed to 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY ^ 

imitate the manoeuvre of Marathon. It was 
easier here, because it was only imitated, but 
it was more difficult, because the Persians 
now knew the danger also, and manoeuvred 
to avoid it. For many days each of the 
armies tried to entice the other into a battle 
on a spot of his own choice. To calm the 
impatience of their men, both generals turned 
to the aid of a prophet, who told the people 
that he who should cross the river Asopus 
would lose the battle. At last the-Persians be- 
lieved they had found a favourable moment, 
and proceeded to attack the Spartans. But 
they were cautious enough not to come to 
that place in which Pausanius wanted to 
engage with them. All the future of Greek' 
and human freedom rested upon the question 
whether Pausanius could keep his men from 
rushing too soon upon the Persians. What 
did he do ? He had beside him a priest, w^ho 
sacrificed one animal after another and pro- 
nounced ao^ain and ao^ain that the sio^ns were 
not yet propitious. At last, Herodotus tells 
us, King Pausanius raised his hands to the 
goddess in the next temple, so that every- 
body could see, and asked her help. At once 



80 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

the intelligent priest found that the auspices 
had become favourable; the King gave the 
signal of attack, and the Spartans advanced 
and won the battle. 

If at the first sight the glory of the Greek 
victories might seem diminished by taking 
away the superiority of Xerxes' army, we 
now see that on the contrary the performance 
is much greater. The Greeks had not to 
fight enormous hordes of Asiatic people, 
divested of any soldierly or even manly 
virtue, driven into the battle by whips, but 
on the contrary an army of the very best 
soldiery, which they could overcome only by 
the union of the brave fighting of the mass 
of the people with the strategical guidance 
of generals w^hose great capacity has not 
been surpassed in the world's history. 

The difference between the conception 
which I have now presented to you and 
the traditional one may be expressed by the 
words : ''It was not the quantity but 
the quality of its enemies that endangered the 
freedom of Greece." But quality is a cate- 
gory that does not suit popular feeling, and 
therefore tradition substituted quantity. 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 31 

Perhaps still more evidently than in the 
land army it is in the naval engagements 
that numbers were not on the side of the 
Persians, but of the Greeks. The Persian 
fleet consisted of the ships of the Phoeni- 
cians and the lonians, first-class sailors 
both of them. The Athenian fleet counted, 
according to the tale of Herodotus, at least 
one hundred and twenty-seven triremes. One 
hundred and twenty-seven triremes need a 
crew of 25,000 men; that is to say, the whole 
citizenship of Attica. By far the majority 
of the inhabitants of Attica were peasants, 
gardeners, charcoal-burners, potters, and 
other artisans who had nothing to do with 
the sea. Only two years before the Battle 
of Salamis the Athenians had built their 
great fleet; some years before they had so 
few warships that they borrowed some from 
the Corinthians for a certain purpose. So it 
is quite clear that the Persian fleet in quality 
and dexterity must have been much better 
than that of the Greeks. If, notwithstanding, 
in the Battle of Artemisium in the free water 
north of the isle of Euboea, the Greeks held 
their own, and though they had not the upper 



32 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

hand, at least they were not vanquished, this 
event cannot be explained otherwise than by 
the fact that they had a good superiority in 
number. How, then, did they win the Battle 
of Salamis? I have no doubt that all the 
different attempts to analyse this battle are 
wrong, and that quite another solution is to 
be found. One of my students will, I hope, 
in a few months, publish a dissertation that 
will solve the riddle. 

The consequence of the reversal of 
numbers in the Greek- Persian War is very 
far-reaching. How often have we heard of 
the million army of Xerxes and the small 
band with which Alexander the Great sub- 
dued the whole Orient. Alexander set out 
with an army of 32,000 men on foot, 5100 
horsemen. That may have been about double 
the number which Xerxes had. It was not 
a small band, but by far the greatest army 
that up to that time the world had ever 
seen. 

Let us now turn to the Romans. I should 
like to divide the conquest of the world 
by the city of Rome into four different 
chapters : the subduing of the Latin tribe, 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 33 

the subduing of Italy, the defeat of the 
Carthaginians, and the conquest of Gaul by 
Caesar. Were the Romans braver than all 
these other peoples and races? Hardly. 
Was the Roman population more numerous ? 
No, assuredly not. Wherein lay the pre- 
eminence of the Roman armies in all these 
centuries.^ It was in the Roman discipline. 
The Spartans, too, were well disciplined, but 
their numerical and economic strength was 
far too small to build up an empire. Rome 
united the economic strength of a great town 
on a navigable river near the sea (the site 
of Rome on the Tiber may be compared with 
the site of London as a natural emporium) 
with a powerful constitution. The constitu- 
tion of Rome is marked by the broad basis 
of a patriotic democracy led by magistrates 
exercising rigid authority, an authority that 
was derived from the gods, not from the 
people, and was handed down from the 
abdicating consul to the new one in a similar 
manner as a Christian bishop derives his 
authority from the blessing of a predecessor. 
The administration of the holy migurhnn on 
any solemn or important occasion made 
c 



34 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

apparent to every man the holiness of the 
office and the duty to obey. 

The economic strength of the town gave 
to Rome the leadership of the Latin tribe, 
whose peasantry and country towns were 
obliged to folloAv the capital. Then the 
well-disciplined army of Roman and Latin 
citizens and peasants overcame the other 
nations of the peninsula, protecting them at 
once against the barbarian Gauls in the 
north. The compulsory service of all free 
men gave armies as large as they were 
needed ; heavy taxes gave the money to 
assure to the soldiers their regular pay; the 
staves of the captains, the centuriones, 
secured the order in rank and file, and the 
hatchet of lictors following- the consul war- 
ranted the obedience in the whole military 
organism. The consul Manlius did not spare 
the life of his own son, who had been guilty 
of an act of disobedience. 

What with such an army could be done 
and what with it could not be done was to 
be seen in the second Punic War against 
Hannibal. We are in the happy situation of 
possessing a very explicit account of the 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 35 

most characteristic battle of this war, the 
Battle of Cann^, in the books of Polybius, 
whose chief features, as some indications 
seem to me to show, can be reduced to a 
tale or even a dictation by Hannibal himself. 
Let us try to picture this battle, according to 
the analysis of it o-iven in my historv of the 
art of war, and defended of late in the 
Historische Zeiischrift, Vol. CIX (19 12). 

The Romans, when they had suffered two 
great defeats from Hannibal at the Trebia 
and Lake Trasimenus, caught under the 
guidance of the Dictator Fabius the idea 
not to hght the Carthaginians any more in 
pitched battles, but to wear out their strength 
through clever manoeuvres. But soon enough 
this svs'.em appeared to public opinion as 
one of cov\ardice. Hannibal ravaged one 
province, one territory, after the other, and 
the Roman armies had to lock on without 
helping ; so it was resolved to bring together 
an army so strong that by its mass it must 
weigh down the force of Hannibal. In the 
Plain of Apulia, on the north bank of the 
river Auhdus, they took up their position for 
battle with about 55,000 heavy-arm^ed foot- 



36 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

men against the 32,000 of Hannibal; but 
Hannibal had a remarkable superiority in 
cavalry, 10,000 against 6000. Both armies 
had the infantry in the centre and the cavalry 
on the wings. With the first rush the 
Carthaginian cavalry smote the Roman, so 
much the more as Hannibal had assembled 
all his heavy cavalry on one wing. As soon 
as this had vanquished there, it sent help to 
the other w^ng by going round the Roman 
infantry in the rear, and thus drove away the 
Roman horsemen here too. Meanwhile the 
two lines of infantry had closed upon each 
other. Polybius tells us that Hannibal had 
arranged his infantry in the form of a half- 
moon ; of course this cannot be understood, as 
Polybius himself understood it, as a round 
line, because a round line cannot be formed 
by marching, and troops standing in a round 
line cannot be moved. What in Polybius' 
source was called a half -moon is what we 
in German and English call the form of a 
horseshoe. By this expression we do not 
mean to say that the points are rounded ; we 
use it, for instance, when the tables of a 
dinner-party are arranged in this form. 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 37 

Therefore what is meant by the half-moon 
is that Hannibal at both ends of his infantry 
placed a column, so that these two columns, 
together with the front line, formed the 
horseshoe. Each of these columns numbered 
6000 men. On the front, therefore, were not 
more than 20,000, who now had to stand 
against the 55,000 Romans, who in one solid 
mass rolled upon them. It was impossible 
that they could hold out very long against 
such superiority; so much the more as in 
the front line stood not even the oldest and 
best troops of the Carthaginian army, the 
Africans, but only the Spaniards and Gauls, 
whom Hannibal had taken into his service. 
But Hannibal knew that they needed to 
withstand the enemy only for a short time; 
for now his cavalry had finished with its 
adversary and attacked the Roman legions 
from the rear. For a modern well-exercised 
army such an attack of mere cavalry, even 
in the rear, would not be so very dangerous, 
and not only because these horsemen would 
be driven back by the bullets of the fire-arms; 
for at all times a good infantry that keeps 
its order had not to fear being overrun by 



as NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

cavalry, even if it defended itself only with 
spears. If the Romans had had a reserve, 
or if they had put their infantry in two or 
three lines capable of manoeuvring independ- 
ently behind each other, the reserve or the 
last line would have turned and withstood 
the hostile cavalry, while the bulk of the 
legions smote the Carthaginian infantry, so 
much their inferior. The manoeuvre to be 
made seems all the easier for the Romans, 
as their legions, in any case, were divided in 
three parts, the hastati, the principes and 
the tfiani, who stood behind each other. 
Why did the consuls not command that all 
the tnarii should halt and turn, while the 
hastati and principes march on and smite the 
enemy .^ Simple as this command may seem, 
the execution of it is too difficult for an 
army of mere citizens; such a manoeuvre 
cannot be improvised, but must have been 
practised on the drill ground in peace. 

All the older scholars in Rom.an history 
were of opinion that from the oldest times 
the tactics of the Romans had qualified 
them to manoeuvre with the very smallest 
tactical units, the manipuli. The course of 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 39 

the Battle of Cannae shows us that they had 
not, and indeed it is beyond all possibility 
of human ingenuity. Very likely the consuls, 
who, as we know, were not experienced 
generals, but the mayors for the year, did not 
even give the order to divide the army; and 
if one or the other of the high officers should 
have given such an order, it would have been 
in vain. The effect of the attack of the 
Carthaginian cavalry from the rear was not 
that one part of the Romans fought against 
them while the other part marched on, but 
that the whole army stopped their advance. 
At this moment all the advantage of the 
superiority of the Roman infantry in 
numbers was lost. All the hope of the 
Romans had been to press down the enemy 
with the enormous weight of their solid mass. 
We are expressly informed that this superi- 
ority had not been employed to extend the 
front in length, but to form each company 
deeper than usual. Very likely not less than 
seventy-five men stood one behind the other; 
no more than those of the first two or three 
ranks could employ their weapons; all the 
enormous mass behind them had no other 



40 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

aim than to push forward and in this manner 
to press away the enemy. Now this press- 
ing, that is to say the force of the Roman 
army, was taken off and stopped, and in the 
same moment Hannibal gave the order to his 
two columns of Africans to advance, to 
wheel, and to attack the Romans on the two 
flanks. From all sides the Romans were 
now enclosed. From all sides the light 
troops of the Carthaginians mingled with 
the infantry and cavalry and cast, hurled, 
and shot stones, arrows, and lances into the 
huge mass. The Romans were hardly in a 
position to defend themselves, and in a 
slaughter of many hours almost the whole 
army was annihilated. 

Clausewitz once uttered the sentence that 
the weaker party in a battle ought not to turn 
both flanks of the enemy at once; for if it 
does so, it falls into the danger that its centre 
will become too weak and may be broken by 
the enemy. Hannibal did what is here for- 
bidden, and achieved the work of enclosing 
an army much superior in number from all 
sides to destroy it. It is the most perfect 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 41 

victory that ever was fought in the world's 
history. It is more than Sedan, where also 
a whole army was annihilated, but the victori- 
ous Germans at least had a great superiority 
in number. 

The whole decision of this battle depended 
upon the one point that the Carthaginian 
cavalry stopped the Roman legions before 
they could press down or drive away the 
hostile infantry. Why then did Hannibal 
run the risk of weakening his infantry in 
the centre.^ His victory would have been 
much surer if, instead of giving to his 
Africans the position of the two columns and 
of forming the half-moon, he had strength- 
ened his front line with these, his most 
reliable troops. But if he had done so he 
would indeed have secured his victory, but 
he would not have annihilated the Romans : 
a great many of them might have escaped if 
the Africans had not enclosed them on the 
tvv^o flanks. Therefore Hannibal formed his 
two columns on the wings. Here they stood 
ready for both purposes. If the danger for 
the centre would have appeared too o-reat. 



42 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

he might from there have made them advance 
and strengthen the front line. If not, he 
could order them to make their turning move- 
ment, and to accomplish the surrounding of 
the Rom.ans. 

The x^fricans were the best troops of the 
Carthao-inian army. Why not oive to these 
the position most endangered? If the 
Africans were the troops Hannibal could 
most rely upon, he also had every reason to 
spare their lives. It was to be expected that 
the troops in the front line would have the, 
greatest losses; the war was not at an end 
with this battle. So Hannibal felt himself 
safe enough, and was cold-blooded enough, 
to entrust his front line to his newly-won 
allies, the Gauls and Spaniards, and he knew 
of a means to fortify their line. He him- 
self, the commander-in-chief, with his young 
brother Mago at his side, took his place 
among them. How easily these barbarians 
might have become suspicious when they saw 
that the Africans stood aside in a very un- 
usual manner ! But seeing Hannibal himself 
in their own midst, and hearing his voice, they 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 43 

felt sure that all was in order, and, certain of 
victory, they held their ground, these 20,000 
men against 55,000, slowly yielding till the 
cavalry had accomplished their manoeuvre 
and pulled back the Roman legions. No 
tale of this battle should pass over this posi- 
tion of Hannibal in the centre of the battle, 
where, with only the moral weight of his 
person, he balanced the superiority of the 
Romans in number. 

The Roman army of citizens and peasants, 
well disciplined as it was, could not with- 
stand the miilitary genius of Hannibal, but 
Hannibal, in spite of his victories in the open 
field, was not strong enough with his bar- 
barian soldier-s to besiege and to take all the 
towms that belonged to the Roman federa- 
tion, much less the tov^n of Rome herself. 

So the Romans, turning back to the strategy 
of Fabius Cunctator, protracted the war. But 
with their army of citizens the\" never could 
have got rid of such an adversary, still less 
could they have been able to overcome him. 
But the war itself changed the character of 
their army. The army of citizens with two 



/ 



44 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

mayors at its head, changing every year, was 
transformed into an army of professional 
soldiers with professional officers and a com- 
mander-in-chief at its head. Not for one 
year but until the war should be at an end : 
'^ Doitec debellatum foret^' said the senatus 
consulium which gave the command to 
Scipio. Formally the old citizen army re- 
mained for a century; but in fact it became 
more and more a mercenary force, till Marius 
achieved this development. 

The military technique by which this army 
was able to overcome the Punic army was 
the manoeuvring with small battalions, the 
cohories, and the forming of two or three 
independent battle lines one behind the other, 
which they had not been able to accomplish 
at Cannae. 

Scipio was the general who had formed 
this new army, developed the new art and 
employed it in the Battle of Zama, more 
correctly called Narragara. 

The Roman army of the second and first 
century before Christ had a certain likeness 
to the English army of the eighteenth cen- 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 45 

tury. The generals and staff-officers came 
from the noble families of Rome; the bulk 
of the soldiers were Romans, enrolled volun-^ 
tarily, or sometimes pressed; some troops of 
foreigners, especially horsemen and bowmen, 
were attached to the Roman national army 
of the legions. The chief difference between 
this Roman army and the English of the 
eighteenth century might be that in the latter 
the company officers were gentlemen, while in 
the legions the centuriones, i. e. the captains, 
were socially sergeants. That this w^as the 
character of the Roman army was well known 
long ago; but what I want to accentuate is 
that the change had already taken place a 
century earlier, and that the definite victory 
that the Romans had over Hannibal was not 
due to an army of citizens, but to an army of 
professionals. 

It was the authority of the magistrates 
derived from the gods, that gave to the 
Romans that discipline by which, on the day 
of Zama-Narragara, they overcame Hannibal. 
This same authority was employed in giving 
to the Roman armies the superiority in num- 



46 ^Ux\iBERS IN HISTORY 

bers over their enemies. I'his point will be 
of the highest importance as we now enter 
into the struggles which the Romans had with 
the (laiils and Germans. With how many 
men old Brennus defeated the Romans at 
the Allia and destroyed the town we have 
no tradition; but all Roman sources agree in 
the assertion that first Marius defeated 
hundreds of thousands of Teutons and 
Cimbri at z\qu3e Sextise and Vercellae, and 
fifty years later Ca?sar defeated just as many 
Gauls and Germans. Now^ there is one chap- 
ter in the fifth book of the Commenianes of 
Ccesar, in the struggle with Ambiorix, w^here 
he says that one and a half of his legions were 
anniJiilated by the Gauls, though they were 
equal in number. How was it possible that 
Romans in this engagement were overcome 
by equal numbers, if on all other spots the 
Rom:ms again and again had the upper hand 
over great odds, even tenfold, of the same 
enemies? Ever since the scholars have ob- 
served that here is a contradiction. But the 
belief in the authority of (\Tsar was so great 
that thev felt obliged to help in amending the 



NUMBERS IX HISTORY 47 

text. They eradicated the ominous assertion 
that Romans and Gauls in the Ambiorix 
campaign had been equal. There can be no 
doubt that the solution of the contradiction is 
to be found in exactly the opposite way. All 
those numbers about the hundred thousands 
of Germans and Gauls, which, according to 
the Roman sources, have been vanquished by 
their heroes, are just as worthless as the tales 
of the Greeks about the army of Xerxes ; and 
Csesar has for his numbers no more claim for 
authority than Frederick or Napoleon. Caesar 
himself tells us, that the great mass of the 
Celtic people had long since lost their war- 
like character, and were under the dominion 
of a knighthood. Knights are always brave, 
as Caesar tells us of the Gauls, but they can- 
not possibly be very numerous. It is other- 
wise, but with the same result, with the Ger- 
mans. The Romans themselves tell us that 
the Germans were so backward in civilization, 
that they had no tow^ns, that their land was 
poorly cultivated, and that the greatest part 
of their country was covered with forests and 
swamps. It is clear that in such a countr}^ 



48 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

only a very thin population could live'. 
From later sources, especially from Tacitus 
and Strabo, we know the names of all the 
little German tribes between the Rhine and 
the Elbe. Each of these tribes, Cherusci, 
Chatti, Bructeri, etc., had a territory of not 
more than 25,000 English square miles. So 
they could not possibly count more than 
about twenty-five, or at most thirty or forty 
thousand souls, or four to eight thousand 
warriors. We shall find a confirmation of 
this estimate by another observation. 

Many of us may have wandered along the 
Brenner road between the mountains of 
Tyrol, and to one or the other of us it may 
have occurred, perhaps, how here 2000 years 
ago a branch of our common forefathers, 
the people of the Cimbri, passed by on their 
way from the raw North into the blessed 
fields of Italy. The Romans state their 
strength as at least 200,000 warriors ; with 
women, old people, children and servants it 
must have been at least 800,000 ; 800,000 
souls who dragged with them their entire 
household eoods on their carts and drove 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 49 

their cattle by their side, all following each 
other along the narrow rough path over the 
mountains, where the first few hundreds 
had already consumed all that w^as to be 
obtained near the road of grass and provi- 
sions for man and beast. For a distance of 
150 miles the pass winds first along the Sill, 
then the Eisack and Etsch, through the 
gorges and over the slopes. We now^ know 
what it is, to move hundreds of thousands, 
even in easy hill-country, and to provide for 
them, even with the aid of railways and 
victualling columns. We reject not only the 
number handed down by the Romans, but 
it is clear to us, that a mass of 40,000 souls, 
of which 10,000 are warriors, who thus move 
along this road, reach the limit of credibility, 
if it has not already overstepped it. Not 
through their number, but only through their 
wild, barbaric bravery did the Cimbri so 
alarm the Romans. 

Barbarians of this kind are the most 
terrible soldiers that exist, and even the best 
disciplined Roman legions were not able 
to overcome them, unless by remarkable 



50 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

superiority in numbers. Well, then, why did 
the Romans not profit by their number to 
take possession of Germany and to revenge 
the great defeat of Varus in the Teutoburg 
Forest? The task was perhaps not impos- 
sible, but of enormous difficulty. " With a 
small army I can accomplish nothing, and 
with a great army I cannot live," are words 
that perhaps are not seldom uttered by 
generals in the World's War History. Ger- 
many had neither towns, where one could find 
greater supplies, nor roads, along which they 
could be transported ; by reason of the same 
circumstances which as we have seen caused 
these territories to be but thinly populated. 
The country which cannot supply enough 
food for its own inhabitants, cannot nourish 
a hostile army. 

For many years the Romans made great 
exertions to overcome this difficulty. They 
dug canals, they built great fleets to carry 
provisions from the sea to their armies. 
From the North Sea their fleets came up the 
Ems, the Weser and the Elbe. They built 
roads, they erected castles as fortified store- 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 51 

houses, like the celebrated Castle of Aliso. 
All these things could not be rightly under- 
stood as long as scholars believed in the great 
masses of the German people. 

Even the words of our sources were not 
correctly translated. Where you find the 
word " limites/' the scholars understood it as 
the fortification of the border; in truth here 
are meant the roads, which the Romans Vv^ere 
building through the forests, that their 
victualling columns might traverse. Just so 
King Edward I, not only vvith his soldiers, 
but with his woodcutters, overcame the 
Welsh. ^ The Romans at last desisted from 

1 The importance of clearing roads through the 
woods is illustrated anew by some edicts of Edward 
I, published in the Calendar of various Chancery Rolls^ 
A.D. 1277-1326 (1912), p. 232, to which Dr. Round 
directed my attention. July 15, 1282: The King- orders 
the Sheriff of Gloucester, immediately upon sight of 
these letters, laying aside all other matters, to cause 
provision to be made of 100 of the most powerful 
woodcutters of his bailiwick, so that each of them 
shall have a good, great and strong axe or hatchet 
{hachiam vel seciirini) to fell great and little trees. 
The sheriff shall cause each of them to have their 
wages beforehand, to wit, 3^. a day, from the day of 



52 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

the struggle. The task seemed to be too 
hard and the country to be occupied too 
poor, the booty too worthless. 

Perhaps the Romans, notwithstanding, 
driven by their pride and by the wish to 
revenge the defeat of the Teutoburg Forest^ 
would have staked everything to overthrow 
the Germans, if in their own affairs there had 
not been an obstacle. The decisive moment 
occurred when at the end of the year a.d. i6 
the Emperor Tiberius recalled his nephew 
Germanicus from the scene of the German 
War. In three campaigns Germanicus had 
severely worsted the Germans, and many of 

their departure for eight days following-. The like 
the Sheriff of Hereford to choose loo woodcutters, 
the Sheriff of Salop and Stafford 200, the Keeper of 
the Forest of Dean 100, the Sheriff of Leicester 
and Warwick 200, of Nottingham and Derby 200, 
Lancaster 200. June i, Dec. 11, 1282 ; March 21, 
1283; July 23, 1287, similar orders. 

In an order of June 10, 1282, is related as the 
reason for woodcutting that it is expedient for the 
keeping o*^ the King's peace and for the security of 
those passing the thick coverts of the woods (p. 185) ; 
likewise pp. 254, 293, 318. Each pass shall be a bow- 
shot in breadth, p. 274. 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 53 

the chieftains, even of the Cherusci, had gone 
over to the side of the Romans. 

Public opinion in Rome accused the Em- 
peror of having recalled Germanicus because 
he grudged him the glory of the victory; but 
very likely the reason lay deeper. Tiberius 
was only the adopted son of his predecessor, 
Augustus, and had no natural right to the 
throne. Germanicus was a blood relation of 
Augustus, the grandson of his sister ; and his 
wife Agrippina was the eldest granddaughter 
of Augustus himself. So this couple and 
their children had surely in the eyes of the 
Romans more right to the throne than 
Tiberius. If Tiberius had left Germanicus 
in command of the army in Germany, these 
eight legions would have coalesced with their 
general, just as seventy years before the 
legions who had made the conquest of Gaul, 
coalesced with their commander-in-chief, 
Caesar, and the end of it Avas that Caesar with 
his legions overthrew the republic and made 
himself the ruler of the empire. Must Tiber- 
ius not have feared something like that, if he 
allowed this nephew, who had even a certain 



54 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

claim to the throne, to attach the legions to 
himself in a companionship of many years 
of common successes and common glory? 
Not envy, but concern, must have directed 
the resolution of the Emperor. If we take 
together these two sides of the situation : 
the German one, that they made the task 
very hard, and not to be achieved unless by 
a war of many years; and the Roman side, 
that the Emperor had perhaps to fear the 
definite victory even more than a defeat, we 
shall understand all the better this fact of 
such illimitable consequences that one of the 
great nations of Europe was left outside the 
borders of the Roman Empire and retained 
if its freedom together with its barbarity. 

The Romans were told that Augustus 
had already said, the empire was large enough 
and ought not to increase any more. It 
seemed sufficient not to fight the barbarians 
offensively, but only to protect the empire 
against their invasions. The whole of the 
Roman army was placed on the borders, from 
the Tigris and the mountain of Atlas, to the 
Rhine and the Danube. In the interior of 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 55 

the empire, except the town of Rome, there 
were scarcely any troops, neither legions nor 
auxiliaries. 

This system lasted for about three cen- 
turies; the Roman citizens and subjects paid 
their taxes, and with them the Emperor kept 
the legions and auxiliaries on the borders, 
and gave to the civilized world the security 
to attend to its peaceful work. It is the 
longest period of peace the world ever saw. 
The contemporaries were as dissatisfied with 
their state and standard as possible; all the 
authors of the time ag^ree in condemnino: it. 
In their eyes, and in the eyes of many his- 
torians of our day, this period vvas one of 
despotism at the head and moral depravity 
amonof the masses. It is true to a certain 
extent, and the strongest empirical proof, 
that peace is not the highest good of 
humanity. But let us have our eyes open to 
some other aspects of this period. Wealth 
and population were growing under the pro- 
tection of peace. It is absolutely false that 
the population under the Emperors had de- 
creased. Itwas only among the noble families 



56 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

of Rome and in some single territories that 
families died out and population diminished. 
Everywhere were built great towns, with 
magnfficent temples, amphitheatres and 
public baths. The whole empire was 
j:raversed by roads, so well built that even 
to our day some of them were in use. On 
June 1 6, 1815, the fourth Prussian corps 
made the march that two days later brought 
it to the battle-field of Waterloo' along a 
Roman road. Roman and Greek literature 
produce names not less in the memory of 
man than those of any former period, Seneca, 
Tacitus, Plutarch. In the space of two or 
three hundred years all those barbarian 
nations in the West adopted the Latin lan- 
guage, just as the nations of the East the 
Greek. They gave up being Celts or 
Iberians, and became sons of that classic 
education, which the Romans had first taken 
from the Greeks. 

Above all, this period that is accused of 
moral depravity saw the spread of Christ- 
ianity through all the provinces and all 
classes of the people. At the side of the 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 57 

^reat authors of the heathen world stand the 
Fathers of the Church. Can it be true that 
a time that produced powers and persons of 
such greatness was finally, as we are so often 
told, ruined by its moral deficiency ? Shall 
we believe that the same people, whose 
children showed the courage of the martyrs 
had no longer men with the courage of 
soldiers ? 

The answer is that courage does not 
suffice to make soldiers. From the begin- 
ning we have heard, that it was not only the 
Roman courage, but above all the Roman 
discipline that gave their towm the supremacy 
over its enemies. Legions are disciplined 
troops ; the sons of Roman peasants and arti- 
sans, who enlisted as soldiers, could not have 
withstood the ferocity of the German bar- 
barians without the practice of their discipline 
and the tactics based upon the same disci- 
pline. Now these disciplined legions ceased 
to exist in the middle of the third century. 
Mommsen and other scholars believed that 
the Roman legions had existed even in greater 
number than before until the beginning of 



58 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

the fifth century. If this had been the case, 
the fact of the overcoming of the Roman 
provinces by German tribes would be abso- 
lutely inexplicable. But in truth, as I believe 
I have proved, the real Roman legions were 
dissolved under the dynasty of the Severians, 
and we have to deal with a period of Roman 
history with foreign soldiers, that is, bar- 
barians. So, if Hannibal had got the better 
of the Romans, he would have established a 
Carthaginian Empire with barbarian soldiers. 
Now the Romans, who had established their 
empire with their own citizens as soldiers, at 
last resorted also to the expedient of defend- 
ing themselves by means of barbarians, whom 
they hired. Caesar had already had his Ger- 
man cavalry, with whose help he overcame 
Vercingetorix as well as Pompey ; the Em- 
peror Augustus had a German life-guard; 
and barbarian auxiliaries were also attached 
to the legions. But now the legions ceased to 
exist, and the security of the empire rested 
exclusively on the strong arms and ferocious 
bravery of the Germans. It is impossible 
that the Emperors and the Romans on the 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 59 

whole should not have seen the danger into 
which the realm fell by this development. 
All the more the Emperors must have seen 
it, because there were in the critical period, 
in the second half of the third century, a 
number of valiant warriors and clever 
generals among them, and the danger was 
even greater for their persons than for the 
realm; for the lawlessness and lack of obedi- 
ence of these barbarians turned very easily 
into mutiny, and most of these Emperors 
were, after a few years of government, mur- 
dered by their own soldiers. But things went 
on in the same way. At last the empire hired 
not only single mercenaries and chieftains 
with their followers, but whole clans and 
whole tribes with the Kings at their head. 
For as to the Germans, any man, or any 
boy from his fifteenth year, was a warrior, 
and a small tribe, such as 25,000 souls, 
was as much as a whole Roman legion 
formerly. 

So these tribes first settled on the border 
of the realm to protect it, and at last came 
with wives and children, cattle and household 



60 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

into the interior of the provinces. And then 
it was that these armies, or the chiefs of these 
armies, proclaimed themselves masters of the 
territory. This is what we call the migration 
of the nations. It was not that the Roman 
legions were at last overcome by the German 
hordes, but the Roman legions had dwindled 
away and the German hordes were called and 
brought by the Romans themselves, first to 
protect the empire against other hordes, then 
to decide the civil wars of different Emperors 
among themselves. At last the protectors 
felt that they were the masters, and put them- 
selves in the place of the ruling Roma. The 
Romans tell us again of the hundreds and 
hundreds of thousands of these barbarians 
who now occupied Italy, Gaul, Spain and 
Africa, the West Goths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, 
Buro-undians, Alemanni and the Franks. We 
now know better. If one source gives to the 
Burgundian 80,000 men and another 3000, we 
now know that this last number will be much 
nearer to the truth than the first ; all the more 
so as some years before the Burgundians had 
suffered that celebrated defeat bv the Huns 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 61 

where King Giinther was killed with so many 
of his people, whose splendour the memory of 
man has reflected in the Nibelungenlied. 
Of the West Goths, a learned author tells us, 
that they had been as numerous as the army 
of Xerxes that was once counted at Doriscus. 
Let us accept this comparison, but in quite 
another sense. The course of the Battle of 
Adrianople shows that certainly they had not 
m.ore than 15,000 warriors, which indeed may 
have been the size of Xerxes' army. 

So small w^ere the armies which gave the 
great turn to the world's history, which put 
an end to the culture of the ancients, and 
destroyed what hundreds of years of peace 
had built round the Mediterranean Sea. No 
words suffice to picture the horrors of thjs 
crisis. For their pleasure, laughingly, as the 
chronicler tells us, the Alemanni burnt the 
rich towns of Gaul; the Goths in Thrace cut 
off the right hand of every peasant who came 
into their power. The Lombards in Italy 
extirpated the whole aristocracy, and took the 
castles, houses and possessions for their own 
chieftains. 



62 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

All this was the result of the Romans in 
the third century giving up their legions, and 
again we ask, why did they ? I will tell you 
what I believe to have found out. The 
power that holds legions together is disci- 
pline. The old Roman discipline was derived 
from the old Roman gods, and in the third 
centurv^ the belief in these gods from several 
sides was undermined and shaken. The 
Roman soldiers swore obedience to the 
Emperor, but who was the Emperor? 

From the very beginning it Vvas doubtful 
w^ho was the rightful successor of a deceased 
Emperor, his next of kin, his nearest relative, 
or the best man, i. e. the most distinguished 
general of the army ? When Caesar died, the 
question arose as to who should follow him, 
his grandnephew, and by will and testament 
adopted son, Octavianns, or the gallant 
general of cavalry, Mark Antony; and it was 
fourteen years before the question was settled. 

When Augustus died, his nearest heir 
would have been his daughter's son, Agrippa 
Posthumus, but as this lad was not esteemed 
capable of governing the empire, Augustus 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 63 

adopted Tiberius, his best general, and 
Agrippa was killed. 

With Nero, the great-great-grandchild of 
Augustus, the family died out, and henceforth 
there existed no established right of succes- 
sion at all. Even at the accession of Tiberius 
there had been a very dangerous mutiny. of 
the legions. After the death of Nero there 
broke out a great civil war over the question 
of his successor, and since the murder of 
the Emperor Commodus, at the end of the 
second century, such dissensions and civil 
wars followed each other more and more 
quickly. Such a state is poison, the death 
of discipline. How can the men feel them- 
selves bound by their military oaths, if every 
few years they are ordered by their own 
superiors to break their oaths and to swear 
allegiance to another person? 

Now at the same time a great economic 
revolution came over the empire. The 
ancient world, economically speaking, was 
built up on a system of payment by money; 
the legions, as we have heard, were sustained 
by the taxes and customs of the citizens. 



64 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

Now we observe that in the third century this 
system ceases, and the world for more than 
a thousand years falls into the system of 
payment in kind. 

In the German language we have coined 
for these two economic systems the w^ords 
" Geldwirtschaft " and " Naturalwirtschaft," 
and some English scholars, e. g. Professor 
Vinogradoff, have translated the latter expres- 
sion '^ natural husbandry or naturaLeconomy," 
but the word " natural " in English corre- 
sponds more to the word " naturlich" in Ger- 
man, and not so much to our word ''fi(atural." 

Professor Ashley describes the opposite 
development at the end of the Middle Ages 
in this way : " The development of a society 
in which exchange and the distribution of 
wealth generally are effected by means of, 
or expressed in terms of a metallic currency, 
from one in which land was given for service, 
service given for land, goods exchanged for 
goods, without the intervention of a currency 
at all." 

With this system you cannot have a great 
standing army of mercenaries. The peasant 



NUMBERS [IN HISTORY 65 

on the banks of the Garonne may pay some 
silver pieces, and the soldier on the banks of 
the Rhine may receive them as his wages. 
But you cannot bring the corn or the cattle, 
the fish, the chickens, or butter from the 
Garonne to the Rhine, to maintain the 
soldiers with them. The reason why the 
system of payment in money was given up, 
was simply that the mines of the ancient 
world were exhausted. In five or six hundred 
years at most the mines of precious metal are 
used up. From the time of Nero, it may be 
observed that the coins of gold and silver 
begin to deteriorate; in the first half of the 
third century the old Roman denarius con- 
tained half the silver which it had in the time 
of Augustus, and at the end of the century 
it had almost none — nothing but a slight 
silver coating^. The silver and orold which 
the older generations had produced had been 
used or had found their way to India and 
China. Even in our time we should be 
entirely unable to settle our daily commerce 
by cash. We have found out the means of 
credit, notes, cheques, bills of exchange. 



66 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

The ancients had neither this technique, nor 
could they possibly invent it, especially not 
the paper money, on account of the insecurity 
of the Government, as already shown. A 
ruler who has come into power by murder- 
ing his predecessor will have, very likely, 
no more respect for his notes than he had for 
his life. So in these times the credit was 
lacking that is the basis of every substitute 
for cash.-"- 

^ The question, why in the third century the world 
fell back from the Geldwirtschaft into the Natural- 
wirtschaft is touched upon twice in Vol. I of the 
newly-published Cambridge Mediaeval History. Pro- 
fessor Reid explains the deterioration of the coinage 
and its pernicious consequences, but the reason for 
this deterioration he seems to see only in the faults 
of the Government, and this would not, as it seems 
to me, sufficiently explain, why for a millenium the 
whole world remained in this state. Professor Vino- 
g-radoff searches for the last reason in the bestowal of 
the Roman citizenship upon all provincials. " Pro- 
vincial forces began to assert themselves, and in 
husbandry local needs and the requirements of small 
people made themselves more and more felt." Here 
the incident of the coinage has not been taken into 
consideration. 

As the question of payment is so very important 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 67 

Now unite the facts that the discipline of 
the Roman legions, as shown already, was 
severely shattered again and again by the 
revolutionary changes in the person of the 
Emperor, and that, at the same time, it be- 
came impossible to pay these mercenaries 
their due wages from lack of money. 

It does not seem that the contemporaries 
understood the last reason for this embarrass- 
ment. We hear that citizens were tortured 
in order to force them to pay their tax; 
but even torturing could produce no money 
where there was none. The rulers tried to 
satisfy the soldiers by increasing their supply 
of corn, and at last they gave them each a 
piece of land to cultivate themselves. The 
result was that the soldier became a peasant, 
and the disciplined legion ceased to exist. 

How then to conduct a war? Mere 
peasants are no warriors; at all events no 
warriors who could compete with the bar- 
barians. There was no other help than that 

in every constitution of the armed forces, I made a 
special research regarding* it in my History of the 
Art of War, Vol. II. 



68 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

the Emperors hired barbarians themselves, 
either to protect the borders against other 
barbarians, or to preserve the crown against 
pretenders, who used to come up now from 
one province and now from another. 

The question, at what time this change in 
the constitution of the Roman army took 
place, is important not only for secular 
history, not only for the reasons of the 
decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but 
also for the history of the Christian Church. 
If it is true that the Emperor Constantine 
w^on his victory at the Milvian Bridge not 
with legions, but with barbarians, then we 
may draw one conclusion, w^hy this man 
formed an alliance with the Christians. It 
seems to be quite certain that he w^as not a 
believer himself; to the end of his life he 
built temples as well as churches. That he 
became a Christian was an act of policy; he 
had need of the help of the bishops, who were 
already in all towns the most influential 
personalities. If he had had still the disci- 
plined legions, his need of other help 
would not have been so pressing. The 



NUxMBERS IN HISTORY 69 

former Emperors had persecuted the Christ- 
ians because in their organization they 
observed a power that might become danger- 
ous some day to the Emperors themselves. 
The Church is an independent power that can 
as well support the power of the State as 
resist it. The Emperor Constantine must 
have seen this as well as his predecessors. 
If, notwithstanding, he in any way helped the 
Christian Church to organize herself, and to 
make the bishops more powerful than ever, it 
is very likely that the lack in his military 
armament, the unreliability and insubordina- 
tion of his troops, urged him on. So, you see, 
there is a connection between the Council of 
Nicaea and the dissolution of the Roman 
legions, who so long defended the borders 
of the empire as w^ell as heathendom. We 
cannot see how this council, in which the basis 
of the Christian faith was determined, could 
have been brought together and could 
terminate harmoniously without the mighty 
word of the Emperor. 

Let us come to our last chapter, the 
Military Exploits of the Normans. Even 



70 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

better tnan anywhere else we see here that 
the number of the Normans can never have 
been very great. They all came from Den- 
mark and Schonen, very small countries, or 
from Norway, a very large country indeed, 
but consisting mostly of barren rocks, where 
only a small population could exist. Sweden 
does not come into consideration, because its 
inhabitants bore their standard not to the 
West, but to the East, and at the same time, 
w^hile the Normans visited the borders of the 
North Sea and the ocean, founded the realms 
of the Warags in Russia. When the Normans 
came through the Mediterranean to Con- 
stantinople, they met their brethren from 
Scandinavia, who had come down the 
Dnieper and crossed the Black Sea. 

Already, in the time of Charlemagne 
himself, the Normans began to disturb and 
ravage the coasts of his empire. Under his 
successors they were not satisfied with the 
coasts; they came up the Rhine as far as 
Cologne and Coblenz, burnt Aix-la -Chapelle, 
appeared before Trier, dared to besiege 
Paris, and though a great-grandson of Charle- 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 71 

magne once more united the whole empire 
under his hand, he was not able to overcome 
them, but bought them off with so many 
pounds of silver and gold. A generation 
later, the King of the Franks handed over to 
them by contract the territory at the mouth 
of the Seine, to which they gave their name. 
From this new home they went out to subdue 
England, and founded a new realm in 
Naples. The Norman Duke of Naples, 
Robert Guiscard, was mighty enough to fight 
the German Emperor, Henry IV, and to 
drive him from Rome, and, having done this, 
he rose to fight the other Emperor, the ruler 
of the East, and almost conquered Constanti- 
nople. All this must have been done with 
very small armies; for how could the Nor- 
mans possibly have obtained great ones? It 
is just the same as in the Migration of the 
Nations, where we have also seen, that small 
bands of real warriors are able to subdue 
great, rich and populous territories as soon 
as these are divested of disciplined armies. 

In the Middle Ages there existed no dis- 
ciplined armies at all, but only knights, 



72 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

augmented by mercenaries. We are in an 
age where existed an exceedingly small 
quantity of cash money; and warriors must 
be endowed with land. So all armies whose 
numbers we know were very small. One of 
the greatest battles in the early Middle Ages 
was, without doubt, the Battle of the Lech- 
feld, near Augsburg, where Emperor Otto I 
defeated the Hungarians. The Germans 
had eight battalions, as the monk Widukind 
expresses it, eight legions ; one of them 
counted one thousand men, and the monk 
means to imply that it was a very great one. 
The force of almost the whole of Germany 
was united, and it was not more than 6000 to 
7000 men. The Emperor Frederick II once 
boasted of the fact that his army numbered 
ten thousand men. One of the best books in 
history of war that I ever read is John E. 
Morris' The Welsh Wars of Edward I . The 
numbers that are there given, based on archi- 
val researches, regarding the armies of this 
great war lord, are of similar proportion to 
those just now noted. The whole knighthood 
of England is calculated by Morris at 2750 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 73 

at the most. Even later, the armies of the 
Hussites, who for so many years terrified all 
Germany, were only five or ten thousand men. 
We need not, then, be so amazed at the 
successes of the Normans. 

As to the Battle of Hastings, up to 
this date there has not been attained 
harmony among the scholars of this country. 
When Freeman published his celebrated 
History of the Norman Conquest, there arose 
against him J. H. Round, and the controversy 
then begun seems not yet finished. Public 
opinion in England was quite on Freeman's 
side. Whoever has followed my lecture to 
this point, and knows the controversy, sees 
already that I am not only on the side of 
Round, but might go even further, though 
in the same direction. 

As to the numbers, I presume that 
William might have had, not 60,000, and 
not even 32,000 as some historians have 
calculated, but 6000 to 7000;^ and Harold 

^ Sir James Ramsay believes only in some 5000. 
Cf. also his essay in the English Historical Review^ 
XVIII, p. 625 (1903). 



74 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

had not 1,200,000 men, as Bishop Guido 
of Amiens, the author of the Carmen de hello 
Hasiingensi tells us, nor 400,000 as the 
Roman de Rou is satisfied to say, but 
perhaps 4000, and if this number should be 
false, at all events it cannot be very far 
from the truth. For William of Malmes- 
bury, although himself a partisan of the 
Normans, tells us expressly that Harold had 
only very few soldiers with him {Haroldus 
faucissimo stipatus tnilite H astingas -pro- 
tendif), and other authors assure us, that 
the English, before the reign of William, 
had no knights (milites) at all, and that they 
preferred to take their pleasure sitting at 
meals and clinking cups rather than go 
into battle. 

Six hundred years before the same Anglo- 
Saxons had driven out the romanized Celts 
from their soil ; now they themselves had 
become peaceful citizens and peasants, and 
were the prey first of the Danes, then of 
the Norman-Franco knighthood. The bulk 
of the people were peaceable by custom and 
by policy. They had no great interest, or 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 75 

did not believe that they had a great interest, 
whether their king was called Harold or 
was called William. So it is quite natural, 
that in Harold's host there were no peasants. 
This is shown quite clearly, according to my 
opinion, in the strategic movements before 
the battle as well as in the tactics of the 
'Anglo-Saxons in the battle itself. Harold 
had nothing but his huskarls and some 
noblemen, also accompanied by their hus- 
karls. The participation in the legal power 
that every Anglo-Saxon had once enjoyed 
on the other side of the sea, they had lost 
long ago, and with it their interest in the 
Government, and if afterwards under the 
rule of the Norman and Angevin kings 
they felt often enough the haughtiness and 
wantonness of the French-speaking lords, 
it was too late, and there might have remained 
a doubt, whether under the rule of King 
Harold, who himself was a half-Dane, and 
his successors they would have been so much 
better off. 

Hence let us return to the issue of our 
examination. How did it come about that 



(!>• 



76 NUMBERS IN HISTORY 

the Greek citizens and peasants victoriously 
repelled the invasion of a foreign knight- 
hood, and that the Anglo-Saxons were 
worsted, who displayed, as much before as 
afterwards, all the highest virtues of warriors ? 
First, a part of the Greeks, the Spartans, 
were not at all mere citizens ; on the contrary, 
they were themselves a caste of warriors, 
and as to the Athenians, Corinthians and 
the other cantons, all of them were in the 
habit of continually fighting against each 
other. So the Greeks on the whole were 
much more martial than the bulk of the 
Anglo-Saxon people in the eleventh century, 
and in those eternal fights against each other 
the Greeks had developed proper tactics, 
yi^ ' the tactics of the phalanx, as Avell as the 



^^,j sv'- use of their warships, the triremes. The 

songs of Homer, heard and learned by every 
boy and every man, nourished the spirit of 
gallantry and heroism, and enflamed it. 
Exceedingly small as all these states were, 
every citizen had part in the Government, 
and estimated this freedom as the highest 
privilege, to fight and to die for which the 



NUMBERS IN HISTORY 77 

poets praised as a holy duty and a glory for 
eternity. 

The glory was not, as so many generations 
believed, the victory over great superiority 
in numbers, but it was the same or even more, 
victory over a gallant knighthood. 

Important as the numbers are, and altered 
as many features of the tradition are, the 
deepest characteristics have remained the 
same, and they have remained the same 
because as we have learned from the preced- 
ing remarks how great a task it is for a civilian 
population to defend itself against gallant 
kniehts or ferocious barbarians. 



THE END 



?!' 



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